[Commlist] CfP CS 3/2021 - Theatres and politics today. Lights and shadows of a long relationship

Call for papers

Theatres and politics today. Lights and shadows of a long relationship

Edited by Isabel Bezelga and Giulia Innocenti Malini


Theatre, in its multiple forms of production – which is why we will use, 
hereafter, the word “theatres” in the plural, has always been an 
expression of the relationship between civic society, political power, 
and the way in which people express themselves through individual and 
collective performances. Thus, from the very beginning, theatres have 
been considered an art available to the community with the three 
possible functions of acceptance of the status quo, protest against 
existing regimes, and entertainment. At some turns in history, 
theatrical performances have even taken on explicit political stances of 
protest and criticism, or propaganda and consensus-building, reaching 
sometimes forms of outright militancy by affiliation to parties or forms 
of government (Ponte di Pino 1996, Dalla Palma 2001, Kershaw 2002, 
Ferrarotti 2007, Rancière 2008, Casi and Di Gioia 2012, Mango 2012, 
Badiou 2015, Bernardi 2015, Eckersall and Grehan 2019, De Marinis 2020, 
Hamidi-Kim 2014 and 2020). Moreover, if we assume, as we propose, a 
broad and performative notion of theatre practices (Schechner 2018), 
that includes games, feasts, celebrations, street demonstrations, 
happenings, performances in public spaces and events, then the 
connections between performing arts and practices (on one side) and 
politics (on the other) become all the more numerous. In this 
perspective, theatres are an intermediate process of interaction between 
representative and delegated power systems and their delegating 
subjects. A veritable media that has helped both parts of the power 
relationship, in spite of the complexities encountered, to shape the 
dynamics of collective well-being.

In modern times, the correlation between theatres and political power 
has become increasingly problematic, to the point that today we feel 
compelled to question it. Are the theatres – art of bodies in relation 
to each other, intangible asset consumed in the instant of its 
occurrence and involving small, often elitist or fragile parts of the 
population, on a local basis, in stark contrast with the prevailing tide 
of social media – are these theatres, then, still capable of catalysing 
the interests and actions of public, local, national and international 
institutions, as well as of the various centres of private initiative, 
entrepreneurship or civil participation? How can they not only have 
their operating costs met, but first and foremost fulfil their function 
in the collective interest?

Contemporary theatrical experiences are part and process of an extremely 
complex political context, with respect to which it is urgent to 
understand and, perhaps, completely redefine their value as a common and 
relational good. Indeed, despite the fact that we can, or want to, 
continue reasoning within a straightforward scheme of more or less 
explicit and recognisable democratic representations, what we are 
experiencing is rather a progressive dilution of the community 
experience, linked to the transformation of the dynamics connecting the 
individual to the State and to the pluralisation of the centres and 
processes of political power. One should think of the forms of 
biopolitics (Foucault 2004) and of the necessary correlation between 
sovereign power and the exercise of bio-power (Agamben 1995). Also, of 
the extreme consequences that emerge in therapeutic governance, where 
governmental actions are reduced to risk management and, as a result, 
political action becomes the bureaucratic and operational administration 
of the same (Pupavac 2001, 2005).

One is reminded as well of the dynamics of psychopolitics, the 
expression of a power that is based on information obtained through the 
analysis of big-data and that anticipates the actions of subjects and 
seduces them with communication, inducing them to become a panopticon of 
themselves, self-controllers and primary contributors to power itself 
(Han 2016). Thus, the various systems of government are revealed as 
ambiguous and ambivalent and as moving within a field of multiple and 
conflicting political forces, with rapid and dynamic interactions in 
which the idea of a linear relationship between citizens and bodies of 
political power is dismissed completely. From this perspective, we can 
observe the increasing accreditation of so-called intermediate social 
and cultural bodies, often neglected by the dynamics of the modern 
nation-state, whose sovereignty is founded exclusively on the 
relationship between state and individual.

These “bodies, [which are] intermediate between the individual and the 
state, and question the paradigm of sovereignty on the theoretical level 
of politics while putting it under pressure on the practical-operational 
level of politics” (Marramao 2013), appear increasingly relevant in the 
definition of current political issues. If we then look at the scope of 
the political dynamics, more complexities appear. The micro, meso and 
macro levels of political experience show profound contradictions among 
them (Deleuze and Guattari 2010), and if we turn to global issues, the 
crisis in which the concepts of citizenship, national identity and, once 
again, political representation find themselves becomes apparent. 
Whether it is the mobility turn, i.e. the mobility of people, as well as 
of objects, thoughts, images, cultural artefacts and much more, that 
characterises contemporary life and has vast implications on social and 
political systems (Cresswell 2010, Augé 2010), or the environmental 
issue, or the current COVID-19 health emergency, each of these global 
issues has revealed, like a litmus test, the contradictions of the 
political systems exercised by so many different power groups and of 
their policies.

In this context, do contemporary theatrical experiences manage to be 
political?
This is what this volume intends to explore, investigating forms, 
functions, conditions and ways in which the relationship between 
theatres and politics has developed over the last few decades at 
national and international level; questioning the diagnostic, 
participatory, controlling, identity-forming, social-cushioning, 
transformative, activist and other functions that the various arts and 
performance practices are putting into play; investigating subjects, 
relations, strategies, words and discourse, practices, effects and 
impacts. The use of the term theatres in the plural underlines the 
adoption of a methodological perspective that integrates the different 
manifestations of contemporary theatrical performance, including its 
representative, social and popular aspects.

The essays submitted should investigate projects that through performing 
arts and festive practices have put into action processes of political 
participation, analysing and documenting their developments, 
articulations, innovations, social and cultural impact and generative 
potential. Priority will be given to papers dedicated to case studies 
that present innovative practices, models and processes, investigating 
the reasons for their weakness or partial effectiveness and their impact 
on the powers’ discourses. It is furthermore hoped that the performing 
arts cases considered will include theatrical practices across the 
entire spectrum of forms and languages, from spoken word to dance, to 
festive practices in the broadest sense. With this general objective of 
investigation in mind, the volume intends to focus in particular on a 
few questions:

-Politics today
Does professional, social, popular, performative and plural 
theatricality represent a constitutive political dynamic of contemporary 
society? With which forms, operational practices, results and methods? 
What impact does it have on the well-being of communities and on the 
reduction of inequalities? How does it promote processes of 
participation in the maintenance, upkeep and increase of the common 
good, which stimulate the theatrical and social actorality and 
authorship of marginal components? And in this sense, which are the 
political limits of theatrical experiences with respect to processes of 
institutionalisation of social marginalities? How can they affect public 
narratives and discourse?

- Body
In a comprehensive approach, the relations between theatre and politics 
integrate both experiences considered private and intimate, and those 
deriving from public policies, in a complex exercise of power relations. 
The body of the individual subject and the collective body are seen as 
spheres of expression of the interaction between theatre and politics.

- Digital life
Social media are one of the most frequented relational environments in 
the world. Their impact on the various forms of contemporary theatre is 
remarkable from all points of view. In terms of the relationship between 
theatres and politics, of great importance are both the potential and 
the radical changes that the presence in digital marketplaces seems to 
induce in theatrical and political structures, in some cases bringing 
new vitality to the interaction between theatre and society.

- Performance as/is politics, politics as/is performance
What are the interactions between performance and politics in the two 
opposite but complementary senses of performance politics and politics 
of performance?

- Public theatres
Public theatres are closely linked to centres of power, both the ones 
that are institutionally recognised, public and private, and the 
informal ones. With what characteristics, limitations and resources, 
innovations and experiments, conflicts and discoveries do theatres 
perform their service as public theatres?

- Resistance
Is contemporary theatre political “because it displays the marks of 
domination, or parodies mainstream icons, or even because it leaves the 
spaces reserved for it and becomes a social practice, [a practice that 
restores social bonds and] incites us to oppose the system of domination 
by denouncing its own participation in that system” (Rancière 2010[1])? 
Artistic activism establishes relations of resistance and subversion 
(Raposo 2015) in order to find forms of reflection in public spaces, 
cultural institutions and in the artists’ own bodies. What are the 
forms, practices, models of action, political and social motivations of 
contemporary theatrical and performance activism? Which are the 
contaminations, innovations and differences with respect to other forms 
of activism?

- Power’s discourses
The desire to escape the representational scheme of meaning production, 
which is dominant in our socio-cultural environment as a mechanism of 
control and power (Belloni 2018), encourages processes of theatrical 
creation and performance that embark on paths of formal and productive 
innovation.

- Community identities
Theatrical and performance experiences can act as processes of local 
regeneration, producing resources but also encountering limits. They can 
operate according to the logic and processes of direct and active 
participation of the inhabitants and of strengthening community ties, 
rather than following projects decided solely by public administrations 
or by sponsors, avoiding the risk of hypostatising local identities or 
suffocating them in favour of artificial substitutes.

- New welfare
Social theatre experiences promote new and informal welfare strategies 
at local level which, in addition to responding to the individual life 
needs, are laboratories of social participation in the well-being of the 
community. Critical issues seem to lie in the difficulty for social 
theatre experiences to be integrated with institutional local welfare 
systems and to be recognised and valued as a resource.

- Local/global
Theatres are political in reference to a context, to a society living in 
a well-defined space and time, to specific groups of people and complex 
social and cultural identities. They are part of a certain environment 
in relation to which they take on a political value. It is a dynamic and 
changing field, in which the unique positions of the subjects are 
organised and where local and global forces, often conflicting, are at play.

Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Theatre/performance and power.
- Theatre/performance and cultural policies.
- Theatre/performance and the economies of culture: its 
institutionalisation or de-institutionalisation, privatisation and 
commodification.
- Performance between ethics, politics and activism.
- Narrative and counter-narrative.
- Contemporary forms and actions of political theatre.
- Theatre and community development.
- Theatre between representation of society and social actions.
- Artistic and theatrical challenges in times of control, emergency and 
resistance.


Submission details
Please send an abstract and a short biographical note to 
(redazione.cs /at/ unicatt.it), (giulia.innocenti /at/ unicatt.it), (imgb /at/ uevora.pt) by 
March 31, 2021 — [subject: CS#3.21—proposal + name surname author(s)].
Abstracts should be from 300 to 400 words of length (English). Authors 
will be notified of proposal acceptance by April 7, 2021.
If the proposal is accepted, the author(s) will be asked to submit the 
full article by June 15, 2021.
The articles must not exceed 4,000/5,000-words.
Contributions will be submitted to double blind peer review.
The issue number 3.21 of Comunicazioni Sociali will be published in 
December 2021.


[1] Rancière J., Dissensus On Politics and Aesthetics. Edited and 
translated by Steven Corcoran, Continuum, London and New York 2010, p. 
134-135.
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